2015 Bio-IT World Best Practices Call for Entries Is Open

By Bio-IT World Staff 

October 15, 2014 | Bio-IT World is now seeking entries for the 2015 Bio-IT World Best Practices competition. Since 2003, the Best Practices Awards have highlighted outstanding examples of how technology innovations and strategic initiatives can be powerful forces for change in the life sciences, from basic biomedical research to drug development and beyond.

The advanced deadline for entry is February 6, 2015, and the application fee will be waived for entrants who meet the early deadline of December 12, 2014. Each year, the Best Practices competition attracts a unique class of entrepreneurs and innovators, from the clinic, lab and board room, who are challenging themselves to develop new approaches to some of the key pain points in research, discovery, and clinical development. Whether streamlining clinical trials, personalizing patient care, or seeking out new therapeutic pathways, past winners have all found areas where the smart application of technology can make a real impact on the field of medicine.

Bio-IT World’s distinguished peer-review panel of judges has reviewed nearly 500 entries over the program’s history, from large pharmaceutical companies, lean biotechs, non-profit organizations, hospitals and care centers, government health agencies, and innovative IT vendors.

“The rise of massive clinical and multi-omics data, and new biotechnologies, mean that the drug discovery world has undergone a sea change since these awards were first introduced eleven years ago,” says Bio-IT World staff writer Aaron Krol. “Yet with every shift in the practice of biomedical research, a new generation of innovators has risen to the challenge. We are thrilled to have played a role in recognizing so many strategic solutions that form a model for best practices in the industry.”

This year, entries will be accepted in six categories: Clinical & Health-IT; IT infrastructure/HPC; Informatics; Knowledge Management; Research & Drug Discovery; and Personalized & Translational Medicine.

The 2015 winners will receive a crystal award to be presented at the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in Boston at a special plenary session on April 22. Winners and entrants will also be the subject of special features in Bio-IT World.

For more information on the program, and to download the entry form, please visit www.bio-itworld.com/bestpractices.

2014 WINNERS: 

Clinical & Health IT:   AstraZeneca and Tessella   (Read News Story)
AstraZeneca’s Real Time Analytics for Clinical Trials (REACT) system, implemented with input from Tessella, provides a complete profile for each patient in a clinical trial, including test results and adverse events, allowing AstraZeneca to swiftly respond to safety concerns and identify risk factors early in the life of the trial.

IT Infrastructure & HPC:   Baylor College of Medicine   (Read News Story)
To fulfill its role in the CHARGE (Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology) Consortium, Baylor College of Medicine undertook the largest genome analytics project in the cloud to date. Using the DNAnexus platform, Baylor annotated 4,000 whole genomes and 11,000 whole exomes in record time.

Research & Drug Discovery:   U-BIOPRED   (Read News Story)
Through the U-BIOPRED Knowledge Portal, built into the tranSMART platform for clinical and -omics data management, a consortium of over 30 partners from industry and academia were able to securely share longitudinal clinical, proteomic, and transcriptomic data on hundreds of respiratory disease patients in a search of key biomarkers.

Informatics:   The Pistoia Alliance   (Read News Story)
The Pistoia Alliance created and disseminated the Hierarchical Editing Language for Macromolecules (HELM), a system of standardized naming for complex biomolecules. The open source HELM technology allows researchers and organizations to rapidly enter, share, and modify complex molecules without ambiguity, in the same way as traditional small molecules.

Knowledge Management:   Genentech   (Read News Story)
By creating the gCell web platform to track and characterize the hundreds of cell lines in its labs, Genentech has been able to create a genetic definition of each line, flag contamination and mislabeling, and curate new knowledge about individual cell lines to guide future research.

Editors’ Prize:   The Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai   (Read News Story)
Mt. Sinai used Ayasdi’s topological analysis platform to analyze medical records and genetic data on over 11,000 patients with Type 2 Diabetes. By clustering cases together based on features shared by specific cohorts, Mt. Sinai arrived at a novel hypothesis that Type 2 Diabetes should be treated as three separate conditions with distinct contributing factors.

Judges’ Prize:   UK National Health Service
The Spine database connects patient and services information across 27,000 British organizations that provide NHS care. By implementing Basho’s open source Riak database for the Spine2 overhaul of this system, the NHS can now instantaneously update information on any of the 80 million patients it serves, such that the new information is visible to any care provider.